It would be a good question for a pub quiz. Who wrote this about whom and when, asks Wesley Boyd.
We're not so old in the
Army List
But we're not so new
in the ring,
For we carried our packs
with Marshal Saxe
When Louis was our King.
But Douglas Haig's our
Marshal now
And we're King George's
men,
And after one hundred and
seventy years
We're fighting for France
again!
It was not an Irish poet, nostalgic for the Wild Geese soldiers of fortune, but the first Englishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - the poet of the empire, Rudyard Kipling. It was his tribute to the Irish Guards, and he wrote the ballad as the first World War was coming to an end in 1918.
Kipling, a fervent unionist, was incensed by the insurgency in Ireland but he developed a great admiration for the gallantry of the men of the Irish Guards, most of whom were Catholic and from the southern provinces.
Their heroic wartime exploits are recorded virtually on a day-to-day basis in one of his last books, The Irish Guards in the Great War. The man who made his name as the author of novels, poems and short stories about the British in India and Burma was an unlikely historian of an Irish regiment. But he had a poignant link with the Irish Guards.
When the war started in 1914 Kipling's only son, John, still at school and not yet 17, applied for a commission in the army. He was turned down because of his age and poor sight. His father was a friend - from their days in India together - of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts, colonel-in-chief of the Irish Guards. The friendship was enough to secure a commission for John in the regiment. He sailed to France with the newly formed 2nd Battalion in 1915 and was one of the first casualties at the battle of Loos. When last seen he was wounded but still leading his men across open ground; he was listed as missing, believed killed.
Kipling and his wife found it difficult to accept that John was dead. They even persuaded the Royal Flying Corps to drop leaflets behind the German lines to ascertain if he had been taken prisoner. They were devastated by the thought that their son might have no known grave.
Though in chronic ill-health, Kipling readily accepted an invitation from the regiment to write a history of their war. It was a work of remembrance done, as he said himself, "with agony and bloody sweat". He was given access to the regiment's war diaries and maps and the book - "my great work", he called it - was published in two volumes in 1923. It was republished, with contemporary photographs from the Somme and other theatres of slime and slaughter, by Spellmount in 1997.
Kipling's detailed account of battles and meticulous records of changes in the commissioned ranks as new officers arrived at the front to replace the dead and wounded may appeal more to military historians than to general readers. But the lists give a fascinating view of the class structure of the Brigade of Guards, particularly in the early years of the conflict. When the 1st Battalion embarked for Le Havre on August 12th, 1914, scarcely one of its 30 officers lacked a title. The commanding officer was Lieut-Col Hon GH Morris and the others included Lord Desmond Fitzgerald, Lord John Hamilton, Lord Guernsey, Viscount Castlerosse, Lord Arthur Hay, Sir Gerald Burke, Sir Delves Broughton and Lieut Hon HR Alexander. But rank was no shield against the thunderous guns. One of the few survivors, despite being wounded twice, of that first aristocratic wave was Lieut Alexander from Caledon in Co Tyrone; he was to become Field-Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis in the second World War.
In the early days chivalry and decency prevailed. The regiment, Kipling records, took its first prisoners, a machine-gun company of three officers and 90 men, at the Battle of the Marne. The rank and file were shut up in a farmyard and the officers were invited to a dinner of chicken and red wine. The "observances of ordinary civilised warfare," as Kipling put it, did not last for long. Less than a week later they found some 150 Germans sitting round haystacks and waving white flags. As they went forward to take their surrender they were met with heavy fire and one gun team was killed or wounded.
While Kipling's narrative tends to concentrate on the activities of the officers, he does not neglect the other ranks. On St Patrick's Day, 1915, Queen Alexandra sent the men their shamrock and Lord Kitchener sent a telegram wishing them good luck. Father Gwynne (who was killed by a shell seven months later) celebrated Mass in the open air. Every man was given a hot bath and "more important still, every man who wanted it had free beer with his dinner, and in those days beer was beer indeed!"
By the end of the war in 1918 the two battalions had lost 2,349 men dead, including 115 officers; the total of wounded was 5,739. In the index of the dead there is a multitude of Irish names from Ahern to Walsh, Boland to Toomey, Lynch to Sullivan.
The lst Battalion had its first peaceful Christmas dinner in Cologne. "They sat them down," Kipling writes, "twenty-two officers and six hundred and twenty-eight other ranks, and none will know till Judgment Day how many ghosts were also present." Perhaps one of them was John Kipling, who remained listed officially as "missing believed killed" for 77 years. Then in 1992 a researcher at the War Graves Commission re-checked the old files on unidentified British casualties at Loos and established, beyond doubt, the whereabouts of his grave. It was much too late to bring comfort to Kipling, who died in January 1936. But one link remains between the writer and his son and all the others who died in the "war to end wars". By Kipling's perpetual endowment, the Last Post is sounded every evening at the going down of the sun at the Menin Gate.